[geolang-comment] Quo vadis, GeoLang?

[Lars Marius Garshol <larsga@garshol.priv.no>]

The genesis of this TC lies back in December 2000, when the XTM 1.0
specification was being finalized. Murray Altheim then came up with
two sets of published subjects, usually known as country.xtm and
language.xtm, which were published together with the XTM specification.

These two published subject sets can be found at
  <URL: file://localhost/home/larsga/cvs-co/doc/xtm/1.0/language.xtm >
  <URL: file://localhost/home/larsga/cvs-co/doc/xtm/1.0/country.xtm >

These sets have been in use in quite a number of topic maps since
then, and experience has shown that they need some minor updates and
fixes. 

Since that time the OASIS Published Subjects TC has been set up, with
the intention of defining guidelines for how best to publish,
document, and maintain sets of published subjects. Obviously, whatever
this TC produces should conform to those guidelines, which gives us an
additional need to modify the original published subject sets.

After the publication of XTM 1.0 Murray Altheim went further, and
updated his original PSI sets, extending them with information from
ISO 3166-2 as well as some UN and USMARC codes. He never published
these, since after TopicMaps.Org folded there was no official place to
put them, and after it was reconstituted as an OASIS members section
he needed to follow proper procedure to do so (which is what we are
starting now). Unaware of what Murray had done, both Mary Nishikawa
and I created our own alternatives.

So this TC was started with the intention of finishing up these PSI
sets, making them follow the PubSubj TC guidelines, and publishing
them according to proper OASIS procedure.

Since then, however, a number of people now about to join the TC have
suggested other code sets that should also be covered. The point of
this discussion is basically to reach agreement on what we want to
do. Personally I believe that we should let history be history and do
whatever the community has the most use for.

Note that Murray Altheim was an employee of Sun Microsystems (and
therefore an OASIS member) until a couple of days ago. He is now
about to move to the UK and will be without internet access until
re-established there. So for the moment any work we do will have to
continue without him, but I hope that he will be able to rejoin us
before too long.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC        <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >